Drumlins, the smooth elongated ridges left behind by retreating glaciers, are so abundant in Cavan that they define the landscape, but using one as the base for a burial ground of this particular form is striking enough to make you wonder whether the shape was deliberate, incidental, or simply imposed by the contours of the hill itself.

Writing in 1948, a researcher named Davies proposed that a depression in the southern part of the site may once have held a church, though nothing remains above ground to confirm this. More speculatively, he also suggested that the graveyard enclosure might originally have been a large hilltop rath, the term used for a circular or oval earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date, that once served as a farmstead or place of local significance. It was not uncommon for later Christian communities to repurpose such enclosures as burial grounds or church sites, finding in their existing boundaries a ready-made sacred geography. In this case, however, Davies's suggestion has not been supported by any surface evidence, and the enclosure appears, at least to the eye, to be a modern construction rather than a survival of something older.

What the site offers, then, is a particular kind of ambiguity. The graveyard is real and substantial. The hill is prominent. The heart-shaped boundary is visible. But whether any of this overlies something earlier, a rath, a church, a pattern of use stretching back further than the modern stonework suggests, remains an open question.